Christopher Hogwood was one of the most influential figures in the world of early music, and his untimely passing in September 2014 remains deeply felt. Hogwood's contributions in the realms of performance and recording are widely acknowledged, but perhaps equally important was his editorial work. His website lists some 132 music editions, ranging from Purcell and Dowland to Brahms, Moscheles and Martinů. While he is rightly respected for his contributions to our understanding of well-known composers, such as C. P. E. Bach, Haydn and Mozart, Hogwood also substantially benefitted the field by preparing editions of works by lesser-known figures.
Which brings us to the present edition: the Quartet Op. 13 No. 3 in E flat major by Václav Pichl. Completed just before Hogwood's death – the Preface is dated August 2014 – it is one of his final editions, and the third of three quartets edited by Hogwood in this opus; Nos 1 and 2 were published in 2013 and 2014 respectively. Pichl was born on 25 September 1741 in Bechyně, a small village in what is now the Czech Republic. He spent most of his life working within German-speaking institutions: thus his last name is sometimes rendered as ‘Pichel’ and his first name as ‘Wenzel’, ‘Wenceslao’ or ‘Wenzeslaus’.
The most reliable biographical information on Pichl comes from Bohumír Jan Dlabač's three-volume Allgemeines historisches Künstler-Lexikon für Böhmen (Prague, 1815). Dlabač and Pichl evidently knew each other reasonably well: Pichl supplied the information for several entries in the lexicon, most probably including his own, and visited Dlabač in Prague in 1802. Pichl began his musical studies with Jan Pokorny, the rector at the local school, at just seven years old. After further study, he was hired by Dittersdorf in 1765 as a violinist and assistant director for Bishop Patachich at Grosswardein (now Oradea, Romania). The bishop's orchestra was dissolved in 1769, and after a short time in Prague, Pichl was appointed first violinist at the court in Vienna.
If Pichl is known today, it is typically in the context of what happened next. The Austrian governor of Lombardy, Archduke Ferdinand d’Este, appointed Pichl as his Kapellmeister in 1775, on the advice of Empress Maria Theresia. The empress had previously advised against the appointment of Mozart, writing: ‘What I say is intended only to prevent your burdening yourself with useless people and giving titles to people of that sort’ (Otto Erich Deutsch, Mozart: A Documentary Biography (London: A. & C. Black, 1965), 138; quoted by Hogwood on page v).
Pichl relocated to Milan in 1777 and resided there until 1796, when French troops under Napoleon invaded Austrian Lombardy. The composer was then forced to flee to Vienna, leaving behind his large collection of books, including a history of Bohemian composers in Italy. Recounting the tale in an 1803 letter to Dlabač, Pichl ‘lamented [the loss] bitterly’ (Dlabač, Künstler-Lexikon, volume 2, 458–459). He spent the remainder of his days in Vienna, where he died of a stroke on 23 January 1805, while performing one of his own violin concertos in the Lobkowitz Palace.
Whatever his present reputation, it is clear that Pichl was well regarded by his contemporaries. In addition to the votes of confidence from Dittersdorf and Maria Theresia just mentioned, in the first edition of his Historisch-Biographisches Lexikon (1790), Gerber refers to him as ‘famous as a composer and great virtuoso on the violin’ (volume 2, 142). Haydn performed Pichl's music at Eszterháza, and even requested a copy of his ‘new quartets’ in 1780. According to Dlabač, Pichl wrote 148 quartets for the ‘baritone or viola di gamba’ for Nicolaus Esterházy.
The list of works that Pichl prepared for Dlabač includes some nine hundred individual items in all major genres, including twenty operas, thirty masses, eighty-nine symphonies, more than thirty concertos, an extensive catalogue of chamber music and a set of sixty violin studies and solos still commonly used today as preparation for the study of Bach's solo sonatas and partitas (v). According to the online RISM A/I and A/II databases, 438 of Pichl's works are still extant – 83 in print and the remainder in manuscript copies, held in libraries across Europe and the USA (<opac.rism.info> (10 September 2015)). He apparently also finished a full translation of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte into Czech (‘evidence that he never forgot his mother tongue’, writes Dlabač (Künstler-Lexikon, volume 2, 463)), but this is sadly lost.
Dlabač notes that many of Pichl's published works were ‘dedicated to important figures’ (Künstler-Lexikon, volume 2, 459). The Op. 13 quartets were in fact dedicated to his old colleague Dittersdorf. Pichl was thus participating in the shift toward dedicating works to peers rather than patrons, documented by Emily H. Green in her ‘Dedications and the Reception of the Musical Score, 1785–1850’ (PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2009). There is little contemporary literature on Pichl, particularly in languages other than Czech. His symphonies are discussed, however, in Mary Sue Morrow's ‘The Symphony in the Austrian Monarchy’, in The Symphonic Repertoire, volume 1: The Eighteenth-Century Symphony, ed. Mary Sue Morrow and Bathia Churgin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 411–471.
Pichl's set of three string quartets, Op. 13, was first published by Hummel in Berlin – according to the Berlinische Nachrichten von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen, on Christmas Day 1788 (v). The quartets are mentioned in the first edition of Gerber's Lexikon (1790). Hogwood's brief but detailed Preface discusses both the history and source situation as well as editorial and performance issues; it is also translated into German. What Hogwood terms an ‘alternative version’ was issued by Sieber in Paris the following year. He concludes, in part based on the dedication to Dittersdorf, that the Hummel edition is ‘more directly connected with the composer’, and furthermore, ‘probably the version Haydn would have heard’ (v). The choice of the designation ‘alternative version’ for the Sieber is intentional: it features ‘numerous . . . cosmetic changes’ as well as ‘new readings and substantial re-compositions which we are left to assume stem from the composer’. Thus there can be no ‘urtext’, something ‘disappointing, probably, only to those who still subscribe to this illusory context’ (v). The two source publications must be treated separately, and further research is required to ascertain the cause of the differences between them.
Pichl's quartets entered a ‘crowded market’ (v) that included Haydn's recently published ‘Tost’ Quartets, Opp. 54 and 55; a comparison with these works proves instructive. To that end, I calculated the average lengths of comparable Haydn movements. At 167 bars, Pichl's first movement (Allegro non troppo) matches almost exactly Haydn's average of 171 bars; so does the second movement, a fifty-bar Romance. It is noteworthy that Pichl's Op. 13 No. 3 consists of three movements: it does not have a minuet as either the second or third movement. The third and final movement, an Allegro finale, is unusually long: at 270 bars, it is nearly twice Haydn's average of 152 bars. Pichl's quartet writing, generally speaking, is marked by an equality of part-writing. While the first violin often takes the lead in melodic matters, this is not exclusively the case: in the first movement there are several feature passages marked ‘Solo’ for the cello (beginning at bars 27, 84 and 120) and the viola (bar 143). Indeed, this last solo is probably the most challenging in the movement. The first-violin part is showy, but one would be hard-pressed to call it virtuosic. Pichl occasionally writes out fingerings in the first-violin part – something, given his renown on the instrument and his association with study pieces, that should perhaps not surprise us.
Hogwood takes a commendably minimal approach to the editing of these works. Given that this edition relies on a single, preferred printed source, the editorial work that remains relates more to ensuring consistency rather than accounting for significant discrepancies between multiple readings. The score is minimal in its approach, using typographic symbols to delineate editorial intervention in matters of articulation and dynamics, but assigning discussion of more substantial emendations to the critical report. As the recapitulations and repeats may have been written from memory, resulting in slight variations, ‘correction by analogy is not always appropriate’ (vi). He preserves ‘possibly intentional’ differences, and only adjusts ‘vertically inconsequent’ markings. Surely this is the correct approach: if every similar phrase were made identical, the character of the work would be diminished. The Critical Report, at the back of the volume, is streamlined in its approach, and appropriately does not attempt to catalogue the differences between the Hummel and Sieber prints.
If the present string quartet is any indication, Pichl has indeed been unjustly neglected by music history. As we come to understand the varied landscape of eighteenth-century music not solely through representative figures, but rather as a world of exchange and inspiration between peers, greater study of Pichl and composers like him can only deepen our appreciation. It is to be lamented that Hogwood will no longer be here to contribute to this process of discovery.
